The most alarming thing about the Schabir Shaik trial in Durban
is that the revelations being made by various witnesses seem unsurprising. As
each new narration unfolds we learn of chicanery, double-dealing, hustles,
swindles, lies. And we do little more than shrug. If these things were even 10%
true, we should be outraged. Instead we calmly accept smug homilies from senior
politicians about the constitutional right to the assumption of innocence, the
pre-eminent need to keep Jacob Zuma's dignity intact, even when accusations
against Shaik reflect in the most ominous way on his position as the second-most
powerful politician in our government.

As was to be expected, the African National Congress government,
in another of its grotesque displays of haughty dismissal, has found nothing
very amiss in what's being exposed in Durban about the deputy president. Any
mature administration would be shivering in its imported Italian boots at the
sight of its second-in-charge, up there being exposed as someone who issues bad
cheques, bums money to keep himself out of bankruptcy courts, tells blatant
porkies to Parliament, and all the squalid rest of it.

Not so up at Zuma's head office. The moment the ANC heavies saw
the accusations mounting against their second-in-charge, they gave everyone the
rigid finger and appointed Zuma to lead the national moral regeneration
movement. Currently he's off to see the Pope on our spiritual behalf — I
suppose His Holiness is fair game for a quick loan. Remember when Tony Yengeni
was found guilty of fraud? They immediately appointed him to investigate
corruption in the Eastern Cape. If Kafka had written farces, he would have
thought these moves decidedly over the top.

Are we, like our leaders, seeing this trial as yet another
attempt to pour racist scorn on their sterling efforts to anchor the rainbow, or
are we just suffering from corruption fatigue? Probably a bit of both, but
stringing through the weekend papers, I began to believe that the Zuma way of
doing things has some exemplary precedents in government doings.

In the Shaik trial it is being alleged that Zuma has been
something of a spendthrift — a polite way of saying that anything more than a
Shoprite-Checkers R5 discount card puts an unbearable strain on his financial
self-control. At one stage Zuma went and signed up for a top-end Mercedes and
then failed to make the first payment. A few years ago South African Airways (SAA),
under the guidance of its whizz-schlenter, Coleman Andrews, decided it was going
to be an all-brand-new-Boeing airline. Out went the few Airbuses SAA had, plus
some older Boeings, and in came a whole fleet of brand-new Boeings, all bought
on credit. Just like the Mercedes.

No sooner had the bank threatened to repossess Zuma's sparkling
new saloon, than Shaik (now amusingly known as the National ANC Rescue
Institute) was asked to throw Zuma a line. Thus winched out of the debtors'
courts, JZ immediately signed up for a sparkling new Pajero as well. No sooner
had Coleman departed our shores with his R120-million ransom than a now
thoroughly impecunious SAA decided that all the sparkling new Boeings were to be
replaced with sparkling new Airbuses.

To pay for these, SAA set up an absurdist rand hedging exercise
which, so far, has cost a cool R9-billion. When in trouble, Zuma phones up Shaik,
who phones up Nkobi Holdings, which phones up the bank, which hastily inflates
another raft. When in trouble, SAA phones up Transnet, which phones up Trevor
Manuel, who has to send out for some extra-strength Prozac.

A bit simplistic I will admit but, nonetheless, the similarities
are appealing: Mercedes-Pajero-Nkobi Holdings — Boeing-Airbus-Transnet. Both
woeful tales of bucket-shop financial mismanagement. Both were at the hands of
top government officials.

It's become very obvious that ANC bigwigs have been taking
private lessons in the arcane technique that magicians use as rudiment to all of
their routines: misdirection. As the late master wizard, Jimmy Ritchie, once
said: "If you misdirect properly you can stuff an elephant into a bus and
they won't see you do it." Or into an Airbus, for that matter.

The same bigwigs are corroborating Ritchie's entertaining axiom
with every occasion where they don't want either to be embarrassed, or simply to
own up to things. Last week President Thabo Mbeki lurched right off the tracks
and went into one of his bizarre rave modes about racism when asked whether he
would state, once and for all, that he had come round to the globally accepted
belief that HIV causes Aids. Such misdirection wasn't even subtle.

The Shaik trial is exposing the lamentable arms deal as seething
with the shrouded manoeuvre, the false cards, the bottom dealing, the
double-lift, the vanishes and acquittals of the conjurer. Which is not to
suggest that this sort of flimflammery is peculiar to our government. Take a
look at the lies, spin and deception which constitute the administration of the
United Kingdom's Tony Blair. Politicians are a generically polluting sub-species
and the Durban trial seems now to have been accepted by them as a felicitous
diversion behind which, for the meantime anyway, all the other crookery may duck
and dive for cover.